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Activists celebrate closure of Israeli settlement builder’s New York store

A Madison Avenue diamond store owned by Israeli billionaire and settlement profiteer Lev Leviev shut its doors late last year.

The closure is being celebrated by activists who held creative, holiday-themedprotests against Leviev’s companies for years.

A former Leviev employee, who was at the epicenter of a recent, high-level New York City bribery scandal, revealed in court testimony that employees of Leviev’s diamond store had bribed the city’s police department in an attempt to repress the protests.
Leviev himself had told the assistant that the protesters were “a big headache” for him.

“Every holiday season since 2007 we sang, ‘He put a store here in New York, and we will shut him down.’ So we’re proud to have contributed to the store’s closing,” said Mindy Gershon, an activist with Adalah-NY, a group that organized protests and boycott campaigns against Leviev’s businesses.

“Principled civil society campaigns of boycott, divestment and sanctions work, and they won’t be stopped by state repression,” Gershon added.

Africa Israel is among dozens of firms likely to appear in a UN database of companies profiting from Israel’s military occupation and colonization of Palestinian land.

In 2013, the Norwegian finance ministry reversed a previous decision to exclude Africa Israel and Danya Cebus shares from a state pension fund, after Africa Israel claimed it was no longer involved in settlement building.

Partly based on this evidence, the Norwegian government reimposed its ban on the occupation-profiteering firms.

Another Leviev-owned company, Leader Management and Development, built Zufim settlement on land belonging to the Palestinian village of Jayyous, according to Who Profits, a group that researches companies involved in Israel’s occupation.

International action

The campaigns against Leviev’s companies began at the request of Palestinian and Israeli activists working to resist land confiscation in the villages where Leviev’s companies were building settlements, according to Patrick Connors of Adalah-NY.

Activists reached out to Leviev’s business partners and nongovernmental organizations that had taken donations from him, Connors told The Electronic Intifada.

Activists also led successful campaigns prompting Hollywood celebrities to dissociate from Leviev’s jewelry.

In the UK, human rights campaigners successfully pressured the British government to drop negotiations to lease a building owned by Africa Israel for use by its embassy.

“There was a snowball effect as different actors around the world either publicly or privately distanced themselves from Leviev,” Connors explained.

Creative actions

Connors said that the key to sustaining a decade of protests was creativity.

The street protests, which often parodied Christmas carols and Hanukkah songs, “were fun and exciting and created interest, catching the attention of media sometimes as well,” Connors said.

He added that this was coupled with “a systematic look” at the different elements of the Leviev business empire, who around the world was most vulnerable to Leviev’s “unethical business practices” and who would be mostly likely to separate themselves from him if approached by campaigners.

Adalah-NY produced a video of their protests over the years, posted above.

This gives hope to us in Cleveland OH and in many states and cities in America where powerful financial and political forces initiate and pass anti-BDS and "antisemitism" laws that intimidate us from standing with the hundreds of thousands of American and Israeli Jews who love and respect world-wide human principles of justice and equality included in Judaic values. They also respect and love American principles of freedom, justice, separation of church and state and equal protection under constitutional law. These shared principles inform us that, contrary to the Zionist occupation of our minds and politics, it is NOT our boycotts, divestments and protests that de-legitimize the state of Israel, but it is the American tax payer-financed Israeli government's military occupation, colonization and de-legitimization of Palestine that de-legitimizes both the state of Israel and of America.